Twitter seems to be fiddling about while Rome burns. Its latest daftness is to double everyone’s character limit, from 140 to 280. Of course plenty of tweets are still nowhere near the new character limit but too many of those that are can make scrolling on a phone a bit disheartening. To be honest I thought the rot set in when Twitter made images automatically appear (rather than clicking to view) 😉 I’m sure we’ll all get used to this and in a few months Twitter will give us something new to bleat about.

If you’re on Firefox there are at least two addons that have been created in the last couple of days. I tried out the one called proper length tweetsand it’s working fine for me. There’s also one called Tweet Truncatorwhich I’ve not tried.

You can also use Dabr which is a simplified browser-based version of Twitter which won’t let you write more than 140 and truncates longer tweets. No addons needed, just authorise it to interact with your Twitter account and away you go.

Similarly Tweetbot apparently lets you play with regular expressions to prune out any tweet that’s longer than 140 – though I think this would actually remove it from your timeline, rather than showing a truncated version which I’d prefer.

Well of course it might mean more but these are the three meanings I’ve found for it after puzzling over its appearance. I’m talking about this –

– which shows up on the desktop (website / browser) version of Twitter.

As far as I can tell you’ll see this pop up in tweets if

the tweet has been deleted

you have blocked the sender

the original sender of the tweet has blocked you

But it’s the same message for each so you have to click through to the tweet to find out.

If it’s been deleted then you’ll see a ‘tweet not here’ page

If you’ve blocked the sender you will be able to see the tweet once you’ve clicked on it, and it will show you a button to indicate that you’ve blocked the person

If you’ve been blocked then you’ll see a page telling you you’re not authorised to view the tweet, and the page’s address will include “visibility_check=true”. If you want to view it you’ll have to log out first, or use a differerent account, or a third party app

The slightly odd thing is that if you’re blocked other people can still see that the tweet is unavailable (they see what you see in other words), so Twitter informs other people that you’re blocked.

Possibly there are other times when the ‘This tweet is unavailable’ note appears, let me know if you’ve found another case.

If you have as many favourites as I have (3,502 over 7 years, oops) you probably won’t be able to get them all in one go (2012 alone yielded a 134 page PDF!) but you have the option of trying to grab them all at once.

Fig 1. Authorise Tweetbook.in with Twitter

Fig 2. Pick a date range… or leave blank to pick all (it may fail if you have lots)

Fig 3. Once your tweetbook is ready the green ‘Download’ button will appear

The output
Each page of the PDF has only a handful of tweets on it (it’s not very efficient) but the timestamp is hyperlinked so you can search for a tweet (Ctrl+F or Command+F to search within any document) and then find the original on Twitter.

Caution: I don’t know if it will display only public tweets that you’ve followed or, because you’ve logged in, if it can pick up any tweets from locked (private) accounts that you follow. Be aware that if you publishly share the contents you might be sharing tweets that people want kept private.

2. Capturing new favourites ‘going forwards’
You can use an IFTTT recipe so that every time you click favourite / like on a tweet it will be saved in some way of your choosing – for example you might use a Google spreadsheet to capture the tweet, or email it to yourself.

You’ll be taken through the steps of connecting your Google Drive as one ‘channel’ and your Twitter account as another channel – this allows your Twitter account to save your favourites to a Google Drive spreadsheet directly (you don’t need to set that up, it happens automatically).

Favourite a tweet then go and visit your Google Drive and you’ll find a new spreadsheet created with your favourite in. After 1,000 tweets the system will create a fresh spreadsheet (same name with ‘1’ appended, and so on).

3. Useful background infoFavouriting a tweet does not trap it permanently – if the original is deleted then you do not have a copy of it so ‘post-favouriting-processing’ would be necessary to capture it.

embedding it in a blog or Storify (in both cases subsequent deletion of the original won’t matter as your copy will remain)

use Freezepage to capture a copy of the ‘page’ on which the tweet appears (you need to use the tweet’s own address – you can find this in its timestamp – and remove the S from the httpS bit of the address

I’ve written a short post on ‘forensic’ use of Twitter (where you’re collecting someone’s tweets for legal reasons) but note that I’m not a lawyer so bear that in mind.

Further readingCapturing web pages (remember a tweet IS a web page as it has its own address!) – Nightingale Collaboration